Stories

"Nathan Bedford Forrest, preeminent as a calvary leader for the South, was a notoriously violent man...Well known...is his angry threat directed at Braxton Bragg, a Senior Confederate General. Face to face [he] called Bragg 'a damned scroundel', and said 'if you ever again try to interfere with me or cross my path it will be at the peril of your life.' " [Source] "Best Little Stories from the Civil War", C. Brian Kelly and Ingrid Smyer-Kelly, copyright 1994,1998; Cumberland House Publishing, Nashville, Tn., pg 142.

Battle of Tupelo

On July 14-15, 1864, Confederates Nathan Bedford Forrest and Stephen Lee lost to Union leader Andrew Smith in the Battle of Tupelo during the Civil War. Forrest and Lee each attacked a Union flank, but their uncoordinated attacks ended in failure. Forrest was wounded in the foot during the battle.

Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons: "The American manhood that Forrest has embodied is one grounded in the willingness to use violence to defend one’s interests. Likely apocryphal stories from Forrest’s childhood have him killing dangerous animals, defending his mother’s property by shooting a neighbor’s ox and then shooting through the neighbor’s clothes when he threatened to retaliate. Contemporary newspaper accounts trace his progress as a civilian: stabbing a white man in 1854 in a dispute, for instance, and killing a freedman with an axe-blow to the head in 1866. Of course, Forrest’s violence was particularly aimed toward black Americans: Forrest climbed from rags to riches over the bodies of slaves."